A Father, a Friend, a Seller of Cyberporn

A Father, a Friend, a Seller of Cyberporn

By SETH SCHIESEL

Published: June 30, 1997

Joe Warshowsky used to help teen-age gang members. Until about two years ago, he spent his days, and some nights, at a publicly financed group home in Rockford, Ill., encouraging Latin Kings and Vice Lords to ''challenge their values, make them think a little differently, that there's a different way to solving problems than shooting someone.''

A 47-year-old father of six, Mr. Warshowsky is in a different line of work these days. He runs a lucrative live pornography site on the World Wide Web called Videofantasy.com, where young women disrobe and pose for digital voyeurs who pay the service $5.95 a minute.

''I miss it terribly,'' Mr. Warshowsky said in an interview on Friday, speaking of his old job. ''I loved working with kids. Kids like me for some reason. They find it easy to talk to me; I think because I'm not a judgmental individual.''

The Communications Decency Act of 1996, which the Supreme Court struck down on Thursday on First Amendment grounds, was meant to keep the work of people like Mr. Warshowsky away from children. Pornography has become one of the Internet's main growth engines, sowing the computer network with millions of explicit images and rich opportunities for technology-savvy entrepreneurs while provoking widespread parental consternation.

The act, which never went into effect because of a stay issued by a lower court, prescribed penalties of up to $250,000 in fines and two years in prison for those who displayed indecent material accessible to minors on line.

Not that Mr. Warshowsky was worried. Few minors can afford to spend $6 a minute for anything, and Video Fantasy verifies the age of each of its 20,000 customers by calling them over a normal telephone line, Mr. Warshowsky said.

''You can't access anything of an adult nature until you're registered as part of our data base,'' he said. ''You can't just click on pictures and see pornographic stuff.''

A cursory visit to Video Fantasy's Web site supported Mr. Warshowsky's claim. The site's public areas might earn a PG-13 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America: toned women in lingerie and swimsuits beckon visitors to try Video Fantasy's various services.

The number of Web sites that offer pornography is difficult to determine, but estimates by Internet experts range as high as 10,000. How much of the nationwide $8 billion pornography market is conducted on line is also hazy, but trade publications have pegged that figure at $1 billion.

Most companies that have ventured into cyberspace in search of big profits have wound up only with big bills. But most Internet pornographers seem to do well.

At Video Fantasy, it is the ''live one-on-one,'' as Mr. Warshowsky calls it, that brought in most of the site's $3 million in revenue last year.

Late Friday afternoon, a Video Fantasy member logged in to the site from Albertshofen, Germany. At any moment, 24 hours a day, Video Fantasy generally has at least 3 of its 14 models available. After perusing pictures of Lady and Mercedes, the visitor settled on Natasha, whose image on the Web site revealed a brunette.

Natasha, like most of the models, earns about $775 for a 32-hour workweek at Video Fantasy's Rockford headquarters -- a suite of rooms about five miles east of downtown that share a low-slung office building with a driving school and a mortgage company. She left the waiting room and entered an 8-by-11-foot studio with a computer (for receiving directions from the customer) and a daybed at one end and a zoom-capable video camera at the other. Then she closed the door.

''He's got about 100 bucks American on his account,'' Mr. Warshowsky said. ''That'll last about 16 minutes.''

Mr. Warshowsky, who was born and raised in Chicago, never thought he would end up in the cyberporn business.

''When I was in college my major was education and my minor was English,'' he said. ''I ended up dropping out of college in my third year, and I got married and I set off to seek my fortune, which took me all over the country. You name it, I did it. I worked as an actor for a year and a half. I sold just about everything there is to sell. I drove a cab.

''When I first started working with kids, it was just after my divorce, and I had made a decision to start my life completely over and turn over a new leaf and just do things differently. A friend of mine had worked with kids, and he encouraged me to fill out an application. They didn't have anything open at the time, so I was just kind of wandering around the school, and this kid looked up at me and said, 'Do you know anything about fractions?' I said yeah, and about four hours later, having diagrammed sentences and explaining Manifest Destiny and other stuff, I was hooked. I started volunteering, just helping these haggard teachers.

''When I got home one afternoon, the director called and asked me if I could work at the residential home. And I said yes and did it for about 10 years.''

The 10 years ended in 1995, when Jay Nelson, a Rockford computer consultant whom Mr. Warshowsky describes as his best friend, founded Video Fantasy as one of the first live pornography sites on the Web. ''If he asked me to crawl naked through six miles of broken beer bottles for him, I think I'd do it,'' Mr. Warshowsky said. ''That's why he brought me in. He needed someone he knew he could trust.''

Mr. Warshowsky did not know much about computers at first, but he did know a little about the adult entertainment business. In the 1950's and 1960's, his father ran adult nightclubs.